Virgin Suicides

Each year suicide is becoming more common in the United States among adolescents, according to the Suicide and Mental Health Association International. The main reason why adolescents commit suicide is because they are depressed. In the article "Nightmare in the Mirror" by Scott Long, he explains that adolescence has changed throughout the years. An assertion he makes is that teens have "Angst and bouts of suicidal despair distinguish this gloomy figure " (Long 156). Long explains that throughout the years, adolescents have become sadder and depressed. Adolescents, who suffer from depression and are suicidal, don't usually inform others. Those adolescents fall into the third quadrant of the Johari Window. The Johari Window is a useful model that shows the process of human interaction. The third quadrant is known as the "façade". In the "façade", it provides information that is known to you, but that is not known to others. For example, in the "façade" can be secrets about yourself that you want no one else to know about. All of this information relates to the film The Virgin Suicides. The film The Virgin Suicides is about the Lisbon family and their five teenage daughters. After the youngest daughter commits suicide, the parents of the girls become very strict and eventually take them out of high school. The girls remain imprisoned in their own home, with hardly any contact from the outside world. The overprotection of the Lisbon girl's parents caused them all to be depressed which eventually led to their suicide.

The Lisbon girls killed themselves because their parents were overprotective which caused them to be depressed and eventually caused them all to commit suicide. You can tell from watching the film that the parents of the Lisbon girls were overprotective. For example, taking the girls out of high school and imprisoning them in their own home. It all started after the youngest daughter Cecilia suddenly committed suicide. The remaining girls descended...

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The VirginSuicides and the Writing Self
Usually our voice for telling a story is our own writing self. A person that understands the situation at hand and speaks in a manner relevant to the situation. We don't normally create a separate narrator to make our writing more interesting. We simply write our thoughts and opinions to convey our ideas. But Jeffery Eugenides writing the VirginSuicides brought out a separate part of himself to narrate for him. An entirely fabricated group to speak the story of the girls. This helped both the writer and the reader in their reality separation. We read it and feel totally immersed in the fiction of the novel. Throughout it we can relate to this group of narrators in their description of the girls. We see their slightly biased selection of quotes and feel that they are just as normal as we are.
The writer telling the story has a much easier time of thinking about the facts of the reality he has created when he is fictionally an active member of it. Although his narrators are not his normal voice, they are still a part of his writing self. They still must go through the filter of his conscious thought to be allowed to write the story. This means that when the reader is engaged in the process of comprehending this story, they unnoticeably bring together three separate filters. The author's, the narrators and their own.
This voice creates a story within a...

...﻿How does the Sofia Coppola, in The VirginSuicides, use a range of stylistic features (film techniques) to display the movies themes and with what effect on the audience?
INTRO:
Director Sofia Coppola uses a range of film techniques to display themes of obsession, the superficiality of vision and isolation from the real world in her film The VirginSuicides. Through use of symbolism, characterization, setting and techniques specific to a film such a soundtrack, Coppola is able to construct the intricate, mysterious and unfathomable world of the Lisbon sisters. The story of the five sisters, told through the eyes of a group of neighborhood boys obsessed with their mere existence, becomes somewhat of an urban myth. Their tragedy translating to the downfall of the community of which they lived. Coppola portrays the five Lisbon sisters as ethereal entities existing on a level separate to the rest of modern society through her unique and specific directing style; creating an unearthly, pastel world of femininity. Through these film techniques, the prominent themes of The VirginSuicides are effectively communicated to the audience, allowing them to see past the facades and illusions of stereotypical 1990’s American suburbia.
OBSESSION
The theme of obsession and the power it possesses is prominent in Sofia Coppola’s The VirginSuicides. Obsession in this...

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American Beauty and The VirginSuicides: Living in Suburbia
“I hadn’t realized how many arcane pursuits there were out in suburbia.” This quote by Robert Drewe, begins the mysteries that lie under the rugs in a suburban home. The movies, The VirginSuicides and American Beauty, expose the elements of confinement, loneliness, and image, which most suburban families try to disguise. Behind the picket fences, and beautiful homes, lies a secret, which these movies revel in such a manor it baffles people who have never been exposed to these realities before hand. Confinement is found in both films and set the stage for what suburban life can feel like to those who live in it.
Confinement is defined as the act of restraining a person’s liberty by confining them. The characters in both films seem to be confined by different things. The main character of American Beauty, Lester Burnham, feels as if things in life he should enjoy confine him. He struggles the most with his marriage to his wife Carolyn, but she is too confined by her self-image. Lester spends everyday with a family who thinks he is less of a man than he should be, and in a job that does not respect him. It is as if these aspects of his life detain him, and he takes extreme measures to be rid of his ball and chain. For example, quitting his job, and finding one with less responsibility, not to mention blackmailing his boss to receive a year’s salary as a...

...The VirginSuicides, is a testament to this; with its soft color palettes, dreamy soundtrack, and the liminal and transitional theme of the story that captures the pressures of going through adolescent rites of passage: first dance, first kiss, losing ones virginity.
The mysterious Lisbon girls’ suicides is told to us by an anonymous boy that represents the group of boys that have loved, revered and wondered at the Lisbon girls and were the last to see them alive. In the scene wherein they get a hold of Cecilia’s diary, the director establishes just how much of a mystery these girls are to the boys. We are never given a clear picture as to the girls’ white-picket-fence suburban lives and the things that might have lead to Cecilia’s suicide; only rumors and gossip offered by neighbors, narrated by the boys; that’s why the diary serves as both a vehicle for the advancement of the plot and an important medium to communicate to us the Lisbon girls’ thoughts and feelings in a distant yet very personal way. The boys wanted to know what could have triggered the death of one them, and in knowing more about them, they come to fall in love with the elusive Lisbon girls. Even the diary prop, innocent in the way that it was made--with the stickers of rainbows, drawings of flowers, written in beautiful cursive--contained incredibly sad anecdotes about Cecilia and the girls. It was almost a foreshadowing of the things to...

...exclusivity helps to foster the sense of community, it can also bring with it isolation from the outside, and also from within, and have disastrous results. Throughout the semester, there have been a number of works that have dealt the issue of isolation, but the greatest representation of a work whose physical qualities in its representation of suburbia help to reflect the ideas in the work is Jeffrey Eugenides's The VirginSuicides. The story follows the horrific suicides of the Lisbons, a family consisting of the five Lisbon daughters under the patriarchal mother who attempts to retain strict control over her daughters from the perceived dangers of the outside world. However, as the girls become more and more open to the outside world, they are confined to the house until the point that the remaining sisters decide to take their lives as well. The story reflects the use of physical qualities to reveal truths about not only the environment that the story takes place, but also the characters that are involved in the story itself. Throughout Eugenides's The VirginSuicides, the different degrees of isolation of not only the Lisbon girls, but also the sense of isolation fostered in part by the neighborhood boys and the entire community at large, help to contribute to the ill-fated end of the Lisbon girls.
The story of the Lisbon girls is being recounted from the perspectives of middle-aged men who...

...Suicide
The natural end of every human life is death. Some people, for reasons that
have never been fully understood, choose to end their own lives. This is called
suicide, which means literally "self-killing."
According to Dryden-Edwards (2013), Suicide is the process of purposely ending one's own life. The way societies view suicide varies widely according to culture and religion. For example, many Western cultures, as well as mainstream Judaism, Islam, and Christianity tend to view killing oneself as quite negative. One myth about suicide that may be the result of this view is considering suicide to always be the result of a mental illness. Some societies also treat a suicide attempt as if it were a crime. However, suicides are sometimes seen as understandable or even honorable in certain circumstances, such as in protest to persecution (for example, hunger strike), as part of battle or resistance (for example, suicide pilots of World War II; suicide bombers) or as a way of preserving the honor of a dishonored person (for example, killing oneself to preserve the honor or safety of family members).
Microsoft Encarta 2009 stipulates that; Suicide is intentional, self-inflicted death. It is a uniquely human act. Suicide occurs in all cultures. People who attempt or complete suicide,...

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...misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are." Americans are so obsessed with happiness they would do anything to get to that point of bliss. In the book "The VirginSuicides" by Jeffrey Eugenides, we are introduced to the men whose lives have been changed forever by their awkward obsession with five fated sisters: Therese, Mary, Bonnie, Lux, and Cecilia Lisbon. These mysterious girls don't seem to really be known in the town, but when the youngest, Cecilia, kills herself, it establishes "the year of the suicides" and all eyes are on them.
The neighborhood boys narrate the story. They are a vague group of boys whose names are never mentioned entirely. All we know is that they are in high school, and live in the same suburb as the Lisbons, and have always been fascinated by the girls. They tell the story as if they are looking back on the suicides from an older age, and still are disturbed by the girls' deaths. They narrate the story to describe the girls' actions and motivations over the last year of their lives.
Cecilia Lisbon is very different from the other Lisbon girls. She wore the same old cutoff wedding dress every day that she got at a thrift shop. She was the youngest, 13 years old. The book starts out explaining about her near death suicide attempt in the bathtub. This scene is very crucial to the story because the whole book is based on how the...